Sunday, November 15, 2009

Wind Anemometer Platform Now In Place

It is ugly and it sits immediately off the shoreline of the Scarborough Bluffs.

Where it will reside for the next two years.

Despite strong opposition from a significant and vocal majority of Guildwood Residents.

It s a wind anemometer, and if the wind blows significantly, it is the forerunner of a line of Wind Turbines destined to run from the Leslie Street spit all along the Scarborough shoreline.

Toronto Hydro also claims that anemometers pose no health threats. Guildwood’s concerns were addressed in the studies done for the Ministry of Natural Resources. If there were any side effects the project would have been declined.

Opponents however, believe Toronto Hydro is pursuing a “vanity project.”

Guild opponents to the plan state they don’t want more money to be spent on the anemometer when they totally reject turbines in Lake Ontario,.

Toronto Hydro reminds Guildwood the device is only for wind energy research and there’s no current plan to propose a wind farm. Somewhat disingenuously claiming that they are not proposing to build windmills, simply collecting data.

The wind data will be collected for two years, then other factors will be studied, such as costs for construction and electricity grid connections, before a decision will be made concering the construction of the Wind Farm project.

The platform is located 1.2 kilometres off the bluffs and is visible all along the Guild shoreline. If wind results and other factors prove satisfactory, the 60-turbine wind farm could stretch from Ajax to the Leslie Street Spit.

Residents, however, will continue to oppose the project with more protests and educational campaigns.

While I haven't lived in Toronto in over 20 years, I have no problem with it being there to gathe rinformation. I think good information is hard to come by.

However, these notions of building wind farms or solar farms or any other mega-scale energy generating projects is, in my opinion, completely the worng way to go. First, we need to scale back our energy use, next we need to be more energy efficient, thirdly we need to reclaim energy that is simply being lost (lots of opportunity for out of the box thinking here) and finally, we need to focus more on local small scale energy generation.